Maddalena Elisabeth Comincini

Abstract

Aleksandra Kollontaj (1872-1952) was the first female minister in Russia, the founder of the first communist women’s institution in 1918 and the first female diplomat in the world. Her political writings on the liberation of women from the traditional conception of their role in the family and in society as well as her political activity played a crucial role in the development of the Bolsheviks’ first legal attempts to liberate women from domestic and societal oppression. Through the female protagonists of her literary writings and her personal life as an autonomous, emancipated and free woman, she constituted role models for her female contemporaries. But did her influence find an end with Stalin’s conservative backlash concerning the foundations of the family and the related role of women? Or, on the contrary, did her Oeuvre remain a political and intellectual anchor for the women’s movements to come? The aim of this dissertation is to analyse if and how Kollontaj’s heritage has been taken into account by activists of different Western European second wave feminist groups in the late Sixties, Seventies and Eighties of the past century.

CV

2013 Studium der Slawistik an der Ca‘ Foscari Universität von Venedig (Italien). 2015 Studium der Advanced International Studies an der Diplomatischen Akademie Wien. Seit März 2017 assoziiertes Mitglied des Doktoratskolleg „geschlecht_transkulturell“ an der Paris Lodron Universität Salzburg (PLUS). Seit 2017 Projektmanagerin im Büro für Internationale Beziehungen der PLUS. Bis Ende 2016 Gastforscherin an der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien. Diverse Praktika, u.a. in der Österreichischen Botschaft in Kairo und in der Maltesischen Botschaft in Wien.